Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  He took the bear for a walk and even out on the barricades. Out on Boulevard Saint-Germain where students were tossing paving stones and police launching tear gas grenades, the bear was conspicuous. The students and the police both turned to watch as the two of them passed, and as he passed the barricade and then an American Express office, Christopher found himself reciting his father’s poetry, first silently, to himself, and then out loud.

  “The more it goes, tiddly pom, the more it goes, tiddly pom, the more it goes, tiddly pom, on going. And nobody knows, tiddly pom, just why it grows, just why it goes on growing.” Christopher changed the words.

  25

  That night the students listened to President de Gaulle on their transistor radios and heard his weakness behind each word. All they had to do was turn the dial to disrupt his attempt at placating them. They weren’t trying to find another station, there were no other French stations broadcasting—the government had shut them down during the general strike—but were content to stay in between, in static.

  Natalie had her dinner in a narrow passageway between two buildings near the School of Fine Arts, at a wood table with steel tins and plastic bags and glass jars on top that was pressed against one brick wall. A boy in a leather jacket was ahead of her, making himself a sandwich by cracking the stale baguette open, spreading mustard, and then pushing in slices of hard cheese. He took a gulp from a canteen and then scooted across the bench, making room for her, and handing her the canteen.

  When she looked inside the canteen she saw bread crumbs floating at the top, and for a moment she felt nauseated. Still, she closed her eyes and swallowed. It was easy to imagine that the cheese on the table was made of stone, that everything was false, but she cracked her own piece of bread, put mustard inside along with cheese, and took a bite. She had to take another sip of water from the canteen so that she wouldn’t choke before making room on the bench for the next in line.

  * * *

  Out on the street Gerrard closed his eyes and walked with an arm stretched out. He crept along feeling the brick wall in order to keep his bearings.

  He needed to sleep, to dream normally. It was a physical need. With his eyes still shut Gerrard walked down the street. He let his hand fall to his side and just made his way blind. When he opened his eyes again time had passed and he was in the middle of a battle. He opened his eyes to see canisters of tear gas and paving stones flying back and forth around him. He stuffed his left hand in the pocket of his tweed jacket, and put his right hand over his eyes to shield his face from the glare of grenade launchings. He pinched his nose shut against the gas, and lurched toward the police line.

  The police were life-sized newspaper cutouts, and Gerrard wanted to put his hand through them. He would use scissors to carefully cut along the dotted lines and remove their gas masks and helmets. If he cut the newspaper policemen open he was sure he’d find daylight on the other side.

  He only stopped when he felt a hand on his back. Natalie rescued him. She coughed and gagged, blind from the gas, and reached out to him, grabbed the collar of his jacket, and fell. He turned back to find her crashing to her knees. As he helped her back onto her feet, when he put his arm around her shoulder and started back to the barricade, he felt his invincibility, his dream, drain away, through his legs and into the earth.

  * * *

  They didn’t have time to talk before a few policemen broke ranks and charged them. The police had their batons out, raised over their heads, and their gas masks down over their mouth and eyes.

  “They’re going to kill us,” Natalie said.

  “Yes,” Gerrard said.

  But, before the policemen reached them they were hit by a barrage of paving stones. The police stopped short. One sat down about a third of the way back, shifted his helmet back and forth, and then took off the helmet and touched his nose. He coughed and spat blood.

  Behind the barricade Natalie asked Gerrard if he had wanted to get killed. If that was his intention he should have let her know so she could spare herself so much wasted effort.

  “Your dream theory is just a cover story for your self-destruction,” she said.

  A gas grenade exploded very close by and they felt it. Pinpricks of heat disrupted their conversation and when the air cleared the blast had left someone dead. There was a body at their feet. Gerrard knew him.

  * * *

  Raoul’s parents had disowned him after seeing him on television throwing paving stones. Now Raoul had shrapnel in his chest. The dead boy’s blood spilled out onto the cobblestones. His eyes didn’t move to follow or track where Natalie waved her hand.

  All the whispered rumors were now confirmed. Students were mortal and could be killed.

  In fact there were many who had disappeared since the first skirmishes on May 3, hundreds of people who’d simply slipped away into the ether not to be heard from again. Some of them, like Raoul, were killed just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, others were killed in cold blood, made to disappear, and still others had simply had enough and went on vacation to Switzerland or Norway.

  There was the blood. The State would kill them if it could, and Natalie and Gerrard saw this and decided to abandon the barricade, abandon their defensive posture.

  “That’s not right,” Gerrard said.

  “Is he dead?” Natalie asked.

  “Raoul, that dead boy was named Raoul,” Gerrard said.

  * * *

  When she’d first been with Gerrard, Natalie had worried about what was rational and what was not. But, at the Paris Stock Exchange she no longer cared. The fact that she was still alive was the only ground she needed to stand on.

  There on the Île de la Cité outside Notre Dame they discussed it. What they needed were wine bottles filled with gasoline and the gasoline could be taken directly from the streets, siphoned out of the tanks of automobiles parked along Boulevard Saint-Michel.

  As for wine bottles, thirty or forty students, men in sport jackets stained by tear gas and women in mud-stained clothes, debated whether they should steal full bottles from restaurants or go begging for empties, but before they’d decided two older men from Café Charbon, each of them at least thirty, rolled up a wheelbarrow with a mix of both full and empty bottles of Pinot noir, Pinot grigio, and champagne.

  It would have been unpatriotic to waste good French wine and they were all drunk by the time the group made it to the other side of the Seine. Natalie and Gerrard found one corked and full and managed to dislodge the cork with a pocket knife, and when they arrived on the Boulevard de Sébastopol Natalie felt light-headed.

  This would be a pure act of destruction, to clear the ground to make something new, only Natalie also knew that it was also bringing something forward. There were lines of memory from the gasoline Molotov cocktails and the Stock Exchange.

  Natalie reached out to put her hand on Gerrard’s back for support, but instead of his shoulders she found air. He’d already started. He slung the first wine bottle filled with gasoline at the Stock Exchange’s doors. The Molotov cocktail struck and a fire started between the Greco-Roman columns. Other students, some with axe handles, some with crowbars, climbed the steps on the west. They broke the tall windows, tossed champagne bottles inside, and watched as luxurious carpets and drapes caught fire there.

  Natalie glanced down at her feet and found she was standing in mud, but she wasn’t worried. The ground beneath her feet was soft, pliable, but still firm enough to stand on.

  26

  The boy was feeding the bear honey off a long wooden spoon while Abby brushed him with a hairbrush that had once belonged to her mother. It was desecration of a family heirloom and Chris winced each time a bristle came out in the bear’s thick fur.

  “You want to go back to the bookstore soon, don’t you?” Abby asked.

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll need to put in another order of the mushroom book,” she said.

  The bear was always hungry and while Christo
pher still had half a canister of feed left, it was clear that the current arrangement would not endure much longer.

  He reached over and took the hairbrush away from Abby. How had it happened that the mundane trials of his life seemed distant? The bookstore, their drawing room, their television set, always having the right brand of tea on hand, he wanted these things back.

  He patted the bear on the neck and watched him lick his lips and use his paw to clean his face. Chris pulled the fur out of the brush.

  Abby let her arms dangle at her sides. She lifted her teacup to her lips and then placed it back down without taking a sip.

  “Christopher,” she started. She took her husband’s hand, forced the hairbrush out of his hand and onto the table. It was a solid oak brush with her family crest inscribed on the flat back. “Christopher. I don’t want to go back.”

  Christopher asked how long she thought they could live in a hotel room. For how long did she want to scrounge for meals? For how long would they hold on to this absurd bear and watch it starve? For how long would they be willing to risk getting mauled?

  “What kind of life do we have here, Abby? How could this last?”

  “I saw a French lady kissing her butcher yesterday,” Abby said. “I walked into the shop and found them pressed up against the display case, quite passionate.”

  “Yes, well the French are quite like that, aren’t they?”

  What he liked about his habitual life, all the routines, was that it meant that he didn’t have to decide all the time. He was free to be uninvolved.

  This is why when Gerrard’s friend Natalie had tried to seduce him he’d turned her away. She was a stunning young girl, desirable of course, but so very French. He’d turned Natalie away instinctively, not just because he owed fidelity to Abby, but because a tryst would have meant giving up the freedom his habits afforded him and his habits were what sustained him. The habit of walking, the habit of running the bookstore, the habit of loving his wife, this is what he needed.

  The bear let out a high-pitched yawn, a yawn that was both a yawn and a whine. Daniel proceeded to feed the bear honey, sticking the wooden spoon in the oversized tin can that stored the stuff, and ladling it out.

  “French butcher,” Daniel said.

  27

  “You think I am the real Christopher Robin?” Christopher asked.

  “Not exactly,” Gerrard said. “But maybe you could be a new Christopher Robin.”

  It was May 27 and they were having some difficulty convincing William to descend into the Metro. Christopher was at the top of the steps, seemingly enjoying the problem, while Gerrard considered the logistics of it. The bear was seated on the third step down, cleaning his paws with his tongue, oblivious to Gerrard’s insistent tugging on the chain around its neck. Gerrard tried clicking his tongue, singing “Frère Jacques,” cooing, and swearing, but the animal remained unresponsive. Only when Gerrard looped the chain around the railing on the stairwell and used the leverage to pull did the animal take notice. The bear let out an offended roar and swiped the air with its paw.

  Christopher Robin let out an involuntary yelp, and it took a while before Gerrard was brave enough to ascend the stairs and maneuver around the bear.

  The rumor was that de Gaulle had vanished from France. Some said that he’d fled the country after telling his staff that the game was up, and that he expected that within a few days the communists would be in power, but another rumor was that he had gone to Germany to discuss the situation with General Massu and to determine the reliability of the French troops stationed there. Earlier that day the head of the CGT union had announced that the bosses had met the workers’ demands. Pierre Mendès-France had read from a list of concessions from a platform set behind rows of cranes. The workers were to receive big wage increases, pensions, longer vacations, and would be allowed to work shorter hours. This was not enough, however, and the workers had shouted him down. The slogan at the Renault factory was “Gouvernement populaire!”

  There would be a mass meeting at Charlety Stadium precisely in an effort to enact such a popular government, and because everyone agreed that the strike had come to a turning point. The three of them, Gerrard, Christopher, and the bear, were headed to the stadium in order to intervene. Gerrard felt that if there was an appropriate moment for Christopher to step forward and lead, if there was a time to find a new game, this was it.

  “We’ll never get him on the train. He’s too big,” Christopher said.

  Gerrard had to agree, but walking from Rue du Four to the stadium would not be easy either, especially since the bear refused to walk in a straight line.

  William was too much, an actual black bear who had his own particular ways and history. A young Frenchman attending veterinary school in Toronto had purchased him from a hunter who’d killed William’s mother, and after that the bear was an unofficial regimental mascot. However, while he was raised and made tame, he was also wild. There was no way to predict what he might do. William was not a cooperative bear. In fact, it seemed that his familiarity with people just made him disobedient.

  “He’s hungry,” Christopher said.

  The animal put his front paw up against the plate glass storefront of a café and grocery. The grocery was closed, but they spotted the owner, a bald man in an apron, huddling under a counter toward the back of the store, peeking up at their bear. Christopher rapped on the glass with his knuckles, repeating the gesture again and again until the shopkeeper finally ventured out and stood, slightly hunched, by the locked door.

  “The bear is hungry,” Chris said. “Do you have any fish available?” he asked.

  “I do not comprehend,” the shopkeeper said.

  Gerrard put his face up against the glass, pushing his nose against the glass so as to make a pig face at the man. He said, in English, “The bear is angry and will break in to eat unless you give him fish now.”

  At this the shopkeeper retreated. Gerrard laughed and then grimaced when their pet put a giant paw on his shoulder and proceeded to lick the wax out of Gerrard’s ear. The beast’s open mouth smelled bad.

  The shopkeeper came back to the window with a stack of frozen fish—halibut, trout, and shrimp—wrapped in wax paper and tied together with brown string. He pushed open the door with his foot and dropped the hard cold squares to the sidewalk.

  “Here you are, monsieur. Behold, fish!” The bald man disappeared inside again and ducked behind his hanging scale. William set upon his packages, opening them with his teeth, and then sniffed and snorted until all of it was gone behind his sharp, white teeth.

  * * *

  They made their way down Boulevard Saint-Michel, let the warm summer afternoon draw them along until sunset. When they reached the occupied Charlety Stadium the sky was a dark orange color.

  Inside the fifty thousand people gathered weren’t there for an athletic event; they weren’t there to watch anything. There was an anxiety inside the stadium. Steno girls in light blue sweaters, university students in jackets and ties, and long-haired factory boys in blue jeans were all of them waiting to discover something, but the bear was hungry again and he resisted Gerrard’s attempt to direct him onto the stage.

  “What have I gotten myself involved in?” Christopher asked as he looked out at the crowd.

  A girl in a short skirt and a brown leather jacket was running in circles in front of the bleachers and waving a red-and-black flag over her head. She was running laps as if she were performing in the opening ceremonies for an anarchist Olympics, while behind her thousands of students lay about on the field. They were on their backs in the grass, smoking cigarettes, reading newspapers, and listening. The speaker on stage was fairly effective; most of the fifty thousand were held rapt, however a few did turn to look at Christopher and his bear even before William let out a roar.

  Gerrard asked if it would be okay if Christopher Robin were to speak, and the three of them waited at the back of the stage for a turn. However, it was but a moment befo
re they were signaled to the microphone.

  Christopher reached out to the bear and petted him. He put his fingers in the animal’s fur and took a breath as William turned and sniffed him back.

  Gerrard stepped up to the microphone. “History has chosen us,” he said. “If that sounds like something a politician would say, I’m sorry, but I mean it literally. History has chosen us. Not the grand history of the kings, and of wars, or of dates in textbooks, but rather our own secret histories. The history of our childhood, and our grandparents’ childhoods, that’s what has chosen us. History has chosen us, chosen us to take part in the creation of memories out of the present.”

  Gerrard introduced Chris, and a few of the students seemed to recognize his name. They shouted out in English, asked about Pooh and the little pig, and then when Chris and William stepped up to the microphone everyone was quiet. Chris was shaking, and when the black bear leaned over and nudged him with his wet nose Chris laughed and heard his own voice as an alien thing that had been amplified back at him, but despite this Christopher did his best.

  “Before my father created the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and before he wrote about a character named Christopher Robin, he wrote for a humor magazine called Punch,” Christopher said. “My father was quite proud of the writing he did there. And there was a lot about Punch that was admirable, quite a lot of skill that went into the magazine, but what was most interesting looking back on it now, perhaps what might be relevant to you as well, is the way in which Punch, not the magazine, but the four-hundred-year-old puppet who was the mascot for the magazine, and Winnie-the-Pooh are the same.”